How Well is Your Holiday Let Doing Compared With the Competition?

No matter how well or badly your own holiday rental property is doing, it makes sense to keep an eye on the opposition as well. This can help you see whether you’re doing better or worse than they are – as well as pointing the way to suggestions for creating more bookings for the future.

However, it’s all very well making this suggestion; it’s quite another to actually make it work. How on earth can you find out how other holiday let owners are getting on?

The good news is there’s an easy answer – and it’s called Google Alerts. This is free and easy to use, and you can access it by visiting http://www.google.com/alerts. You can check specific competitors by using this tool, as well as looking for associated keywords to find other news and updates on your interests. For example if you have a holiday rental property in Helston in Cornwall, you could look up Helston holiday rentals or something similar to see what pops up.

How easy is it to set up a Google Alert?

The short answer? Very easy. Just pop your search query into the first box and leave the second box on ‘everything’. This means you’ll get news, blogs and lots of other results as well. It’s up to you whether you want to get alerts constantly, daily or weekly, but you should find weekly is enough.

Then set the next box to get ‘all’ results so you don’t miss anything, and enter your email address below. You’ll get an email asking to confirm you want to set up the alert, and once you click on that your alert will be live. It takes just a few minutes to set up several of these – one for every phrase you want to track – and it’s well worth doing so.

What should you do with the results?

The results will reveal whether your competitors are doing really well or whether they’re struggling to make bookings. If you find they’re booking up more nights than you are, ask yourself why. Perhaps it’s time to focus on doing some more marketing activities on a more regular basis.

In fact, it’s worth putting the name of your own holiday rental down as a Google Alert phrase too. If you don’t get many results back for your own holiday let, you know you’ve got some work to do when it comes to marketing. Once you start finding some results for your own holiday property you’ll know your message is starting to trickle through.

And what if your competitors seem to be getting more headlines than you are? If this happens, take a fresh look at your property and see how you can improve it. Perhaps you need to make some repairs. You might need to think about creating some offers to tempt people into booking with you instead of the competition.

Either way, Google Alerts is a useful tool that can provide helpful insights in to your industry and give you information that may be worth acting on.